H59: Using the link element and navigation tools

Important Information about Techniques

See Understanding Techniques for WCAG Success Criteria for important information about the usage of these informative techniques and how they relate to the normative WCAG 2.0 success criteria. The Applicability section explains the scope of the technique, and the presence of techniques for a specific technology does not imply that the technology can be used in all situations to create content that meets WCAG 2.0.

User Agent and Assistive Technology Support Notes

Description

The objective of this technique is to describe how the link element can
provide metadata about the position of an HTML page within a set of Web pages or can
assist in locating content with a set of Web pages. The value of the rel
attributes indicates what type of relation is being described, and the href
attribute provides a link to the document having that relation. Multiple
link elements can provide multiple relationships. Several values of
rel are useful:

Start: Refers to the first document in a collection of documents.

Next: Refers to the next document in a linear sequence of documents.

Prev: Refers to the previous document in an ordered series of documents.

Contents: Refers to a document serving as a table of contents.

Index: Refers to a document providing an index for the current document.

Examples

Example 1

A Web page for Chapter 2 of an on-line book might contain the following links
within the head section.

Tests

Procedure

Check that all link elements pertaining to navigation occur in the
head section of the document.

For each link element in the head section of the
document which pertains to navigation, check that it contains at least:

a rel attribute identifying the link type

a valid href attribute to locate the appropriate resource

Expected Results

All of the checks above are true.

If this is a sufficient technique for a success criterion, failing this test procedure does not necessarily mean that the success criterion has not been satisfied in some other way, only that this technique has not been successfully implemented and can not be used to claim conformance.